Forget everything you know about Peking Opera. Toss your Cantopop CDs out the window. And while you're at it, banish your memories of Sister Drum , the 1995 release that was an unlikely international hit for Zhu Zheqin, the Chinese singer better known as Dadawa.

Sister Drum wasn't a bad record, but its glossy appropriation of Tibetan folk music led to Dadawa being praised–or pilloried–as "the Chinese Enya". Back then, the comparison might have been valid, but not anymore.

Seven Days , Dadawa's most recent release, finds the singer's voice as pure as ever, but her music has become an uncategorizable mix of Asian percussion sounds and sophisticated electronic processing. And she's now drawing on a much wider spectrum of influences, while referring specifically to her own Hunan heritage.

"Before, we were always talking about Tibet," she allows. "This time, actually, it's more elements from all over Asia, especially southern Asia. We're also talking about China, modern China. China is not Beijing. It's not Shanghai. These cities can't represent the whole of China. China is a big concept. It's a multicultural country; we combine lots of different cultures together. It has different colours: it's connected with India, with southern Asia, with Tibet, with Persia. So at this time, my view of new music is that we can really combine many different elements, but in our own way."

Dadawa's speaking to me from a Vancouver apartment. For the past few months, she's been artist in residence at UBC's Institute of Asian Research, where she's been investigating various Buddhist vocal traditions. And now the peripatetic singer is getting ready to jet off for a spell in Korea, but not before she closes her local residency, and the month-long explor颅ASIAN festival, with next Thursday's (May 31) concert at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts.

"I'm kind of a bohemian," she says. "The last 10 years, I just move, move, move."

Her peregrinations have yielded a well-received TV series, Into Africa , and a full-length documentary film, Sound Pilgrimage , that traces her encounters with folk and classical musicians all over India, Nepal, and Tibet. In the interim, she's recorded a live CD of Asian ballads with orchestral accompaniment, collaborated with the Chieftains, been named one of China's leading cultural pioneers by the Beijing Evening News , and assembled the Toronto-based sextet that will back her at the Chan.

"I wanted to find musicians who were not just working in one kind of music," she says of her Canadian touring unit, whose members range from erhu virtuoso George Gao to former Lighthouse pianist Paul Hoffert. "So these people have an open view of music. I always remember the first time we got together to practise: they paid lots and lots of attention. They asked me the meaning of every song, and then after that they can really bring that into what they play. They can touch the essence of what I'm trying to say."

And what she's trying to say is that the old stereotypes of Chinese music–and even some of the newer ones–are over.

"We have our own new voice that's not opera, not secondhand jazz, not secondhand rock 'n' roll," Dadawa contends, "and I think I'm the one to show this to the people."